Riverview Medical Center

FALL 2014

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w w w. s p i r i t o f w o m e n . c o m FA L L 2 014 S P I R I T O F W O M E N
For appearances, please contact Brenda Kane at bkane@apbspeakers.com.
Bob and Lee Woodruff
and kids
The Bob Woodruff Foundation
For more information about the Bob Woodruff
Foundation, which assists wounded service members
and their families with more than $21 million invested
to date, go to http://bobwoodrufffoundation.org.
C
ircles. Networks. Communities. These
intertwined groups of family and friends
who share your life are the most valuable
resource you have when you're a caregiver,
says author and "CBS This Morning"
contributor Lee Woodruff.
Eight years ago, Woodruff became a caregiver "in
an instant," she says, when her husband, ABC News
anchor Bob Woodruff, suffered traumatic brain injury
from a roadside bomb while on assignment in Iraq. He
spent many months recovering in medical facilities and
at home, while Lee Woodruff managed the compet-
ing demands of caring for both her husband and the
couple's four young children.
"I had an incredible group of people who stepped
into the void [after Bob was injured]," says Woodruff,
who with her husband has established the Bob Wood-
ruff Foundation to help wounded service members and
their families. But even though she knew her children
were in good hands with family members, she still wor-
ried about missing important time with them.
"I had to keep remembering that 'You're just one
mommy doing the very best you can.' … I would tuck
my kids in at night and search their eyes, to see if they
wanted to talk to me or anyone else [about what was
going on with their father]," she says. "But my kids came
through it all in incredible ways. Mostly they just wanted
to know that someone was there [for them], and that
they were loved."
STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
Because she's a type A person, Woodruff says she
had a tendency to want to do everything herself, and
she wishes she had asked others for help more often to
avoid burning herself out at times.
"The best piece of advice that I ever got was to sub-
scribe to the 'chit' system," she says. "You give everyone
one chit for later to do something helpful, maybe fix
the water heater or take your kid to sports practice. It
ennobled the person who had offered because they
[knew they would get] to do something, and it made me
not feel like the community beggar. It's a great way to
organize [help] without having to know what you [might]
need at that very moment."
She also found that help sometimes came from unex-
pected sources besides her family and close friends.
"The people that you think will be your foundation help
aren't necessarily the ones who come into the void," she
says, adding that it's important to "let everyone into your
circle that you can."
BE NICE TO YOURSELF
Woodruff says she decided right from the start, when her
husband was in a coma for 36 days in a U.S. military hos-
pital in Germany, that she needed to take care of herself
too. "I was like a warrior when Bob was in a coma," she
says. "I stopped any alcohol, ate super healthy, got off any
kind of caffeine. I knew it would be an endurance test."
Woodruff says she also learned not to look too far
ahead during those early days when the future seemed
so uncertain. "Your world just shrinks down to really bite-
size pieces," she says. "I almost had to put blinders on.
You don't try to go day by day because it's too much.
[Sometimes] you just go hour by hour."
Later, back at the family's home in suburban New York,
she rejoined her early morning swim group at the local
YMCA to get some exercise and help regain a sense of
normalcy in her routine. "For that one hour a day I could
unhinge my mind. I could cry underwater too," she says.
It may sound counterintuitive, but taking time to appreci-
ate life's little moments also helps ease the stress of long-
term caregiving, says Woodruff. "I recalibrated that sense
of joy. A great cup of coffee in the morning, watching the
sun come up—these things become really important to fix
on," she says. "It's the good part of the bad things."
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